B(l)eeping bed

Every night before I go to bed, I pray that no one sends us a fax.

Due to Big A's love for all electronic stuff--no matter how alien and unnecessary it is to our lives-- we are now in proud possession of a fax/scan machine. And because there are no phone jack things in the study, the fax machine sits waiting like an nascent weapon under our bed.

I bet even the President doesn't keep a fax machine that close as he sleeps.

_

Radio

"Live me?"
He asks.

(Or is it
"Leave me"?)

"Army kill me.
Live me, please."

_

Frangipane (Paint)

my eyes sip roses
light lurks lupine

~the contractions
of heart birth~

I throw my furies
to escape me now

~prowl the pretty
places we live~

_

Tired

My leaf self

finds

caterpillar trains.

These gods

tuck 11 maps

to my life

into safe folds

in my brain,

shape it shut

like 

a sand castle
installation.

_

un-koothu

Despite an increasingly adversarial situation in one of my classes that's psychically depleting me, I managed to send off my proposal for a chapter on Mangai this evening. Yay, me.

Mangai expertly uses traditional, low culture forms like koothu to interrogate feminist issues including female infanticide and feticide. Or so I say, and because I was writing about it, I guess my mind had been working hard to process these cruelties and make sense/contain them. And so...

***

Last night, I dreamt that I led my three-year-old daughter  on to a public bus in Tamizh Nadu crowded with standing grownups and gave her instructions on where to sit (in the middle--it's the safest) and where to get off the bus (after two stops).

She said, "ok mama," but bumbled around like the three-year-old she is. The sort of happy, carefree bumbling around that--especially in the mornings when our deadlines are tight as a noose--can make me want to cry and/or laugh helplessly.

The bus conductor was very helpful, promising to help, but as I walked away from the bus, I realized that he was following me around chatting away. And then I realized I'd left my baby on a bus where she didn't know anybody.

Nothing happened. But the possibility of disaster, the sense of menace was huge. I couldn't fall back asleep even after I'd checked that both kids were in their beds. And not on buses.

_

Quiet complaint

We went to see Li'l A's school production of "The Bollywood Jungle Book" today. I really wasn't going to say anything about "Bollywood" or "Jungle Book." Hey, elementary school. The kids just want to have fun. Li'l A didn't get color cast as Mowgli, so that was good and he was the most bored Bollywood dancer I've ever seen :). Then for a grand finale, they decided to dance to "Jai Ho" (from Slumdog Millionaire). Yes.

I like both those stories, I like both those movies, I sing those songs to my kids all the time. But really? A group of educators didn't see anything problematic about sandwiching the pablum of their essentialist Indian experience between the bookends of Kipling and Boyle? There really is no fucking post in postcolonial.

I leaned the back of my head into Big A and muttered a restrained "Eff you" to the ceiling.

******
The rest of the day--as Li'l A likes to say-- was awesome sauce. First was birthday brunch with family and friends (and so many flowers!) where I ended up on the floor with the kids climbing all over and around me, and then my awesome MIL threw a dinner party and baked me the bestest birthday cake :).

_

Post

And after the excesses of my birthday, I was awoken this morning by our itinerant rooster crowing. I ate another cupcake and went back to bed.